Kissed by grief
by jjthewriter1001
Summary: Sawyer and Kate before the crash. Just a brief glance shared between two people both kissed by death.Rating: Some swearing and sexual stuff.Pairing: S, K. SOC


To James death, like alcohol, had an addictive taste. Not that its taste was one that he would ever describe as enjoyable, indeed there were times when he found whiskey so unpalatable that it made him wretch, but there was something reassuring about its predictable unpleasant ugliness, something kind about its nasty dullness. Death tasted like dirty metal that got behind the teeth and stayed under the tongue; alcohol never shifted that but it made it fuzzier and further away. Being drunk was always a relief.

He was drinking whiskey from a tumbler warmed by his hand when he told the waitress pressing against his side and death was a friend that was always with him. Poorly lit bars coated in failure and infidelity always made him feel like turning his monsters into cheap poetry and pick-up lines. The waitress laughed a muddy laugh, and pushed out her hip in a way that suggested fucking nosily in a low-rent motel.

"What you talking bout sugar?"

Her confusion was delightful to the ear, not unlike the sensual sound of ice knocking against clean glass. He wanted more, like always, wanted more of her, of it, wanted to taste her smoky laugh and her red-coloured stupidity.

"Death walks beside me," he muttered in a low voice.

She raised an eyebrow and, upon deciding he was joking, she laughed again. "You're crazy."

Of all the names she could have called him that was probably the sharpest shard of glass to shove into his heart. _Crazy,_ put that on my fucking tombstone he thought. He didn't credit the accuracy of her insult as anything more than blind luck, from her dull, glassy expression he could tell she bore no insightful intuition into his mind; it was just the clumsy guess of a woman dealing in sex, jesting in rhythm, making plans for the night time when creatures like themselves were allowed to revel in their dirtiness under a cloak of darkness.

"You talking bout the Grim Reaper?" She said into his ear, hot breathe blowing intoxicating suggestion his way.

"Nah, baby," he drawled. 

She wasn't even that attractive but he was too lazy to fight it in the end. Sex was a good a thing as any to whitewash the mind and push out all uncomfortable shapes and hissing voices, better than whiskey sometimes even. He took her back to his house and fucked her with the lights out and the television on low.

He could still taste death, dust and history, on his tongue even as he kissed her and licked at her neck, and with her head thrown back and her mouth stretched upon too wide she called out a name that wasn't his. So ugly and so beautiful he thought through the fog of his sleepy mind.

Afterwards, caught off guard by the false intimacy created by the smell of orgasm, and a shared cigarette he found himself telling her what he had meant about his friend death. That death was a shadow he saw in his own reflection, ugly little truths in the cracks of his face, flashes of the mess hidden within. 

"You are one odd fish," she said in response and nothing more.

-------

The next day he went for a walk through the graveyard. A whisper in his head told him that this was the behaviour of a dangerously morbid man. Yet he dealt out his own therapy and when whisky and sex had stopped dulling the world then the only silence he could find was offered by the serenity of the dead.

He walked between the gravestones, dotted like teeth of a gappy smile, zig zagged across the field. He stopped occasionally to read the names on the headstones and to admire the flowers laid by loved ones. Wilting daises and heartfelt epitaphs only scratch at his numbness, never quite breaking the surface.

He was standing beside Jamie Kane, deceased 2000, when he saw her.

She was standing next to one of the graves a few metres away with her back to him. It was easy to tell she was crying from the way her body shook as if swaying to the music of a song only she could hear. He knew she was beautiful too even though he could not see her face. She was tall and magnificent, dressed all in black, her long brown hair the only contrast provided by her outline. She had an air of sadness around her, vivid even flanked against backdrop of a hundred deaths; her mystery and her misery was instantly intoxicating, creating a tangible almost scent like presence that travelled on the breeze and settled on his skin.

She turned to look at him eventually, blinking through the sunlight. She smiled and lifted her head gracefully, the poise of the defiant, then slowly walked away. As he watched her retreating he wondered who she had been crying for and if she knew what a beautiful mess she had made glistening with grief under the gaze of a stranger.

He thought about the look she had given him all afternoon and wondered what it was about her couldn't forget, wondered why she was haunting him like history and whiskey and death.

It came to him eventually, of course. He knew what he seen in those big sorrowful eyes and twisted smile. He knew what had been reflected back at him by the woman with a wretched secret sitting on her shoulders, pressing them down, the ghost of death kissing at her neck. In her misery, her beauty, her tragedy he had seen himself.

As he made his way home, slowly walking, rolling the metallic tasting demons round his mouth, humming under his breath, he remembered he had the phone number of last night's lover in his pocket: a seven-digit cliché written carefully in red lipstick. He held it between his fingers for a while, staring at the marks on the paper as if trying to burn them into his mind - then he let go – and thought of nothing as he watched yesterday ghost away on the wind.


End file.
